Maybe I'm playing it wrong...

[Uller]

I am in pretty much exactly the same boat as the guy that started this thread:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/297237-d-d-4th-edition-core-essentials.html

...except that I had also played 3e for several years when it first came out, at least until all my free time dried up between coaching hockey, work, joining the Army, going to Iraq, coming home from Iraq, rescuing my unit's security dog from Iraq, 7 puppy surprise! (deep breath)...coaching more hockey, working more, new baby on the way...D&D sort of fell by the way side...

...anyway...my son is 12. We picked up the red box about a month ago. My son played through the player book and the downloadable Ghost Light Fens adventure. Over the weekend we decided to play through the adventure in the DM book with me DMing. We used the character builder to build three more characters. I ran the wizard and cleric while my son ran the fighter and rogue. The fight with the goblins and wolves proved exceedingly tough for our four first level characters...most of the PCs had to expend their daily powers and most of their healing surges.

Fair enough, I thought...It is on the way to the dungeon...the PCs can rest prior to entering the dungeon. He chose to take the southern passage into the goblin lair...the one that leads to two goblins, a shaman and a guard drake...this fight was tougher than the first...One character died (the cleric!) and one was nearly killed. The fight took forever and my son was noticably bored. We're just learning and we probably weren't making optimal decisions...but I would think the first two encounters in a first level adventure would be the easy "minion" sort that builds tension and story...maybe drops a clue or two about the nature of the enemy/challenge and saps a little of the PCs' strength...not encounters that nearly kills (or actually kills) PCs and forces the party to retreat and rest. Honestly...I even cheated a little in favor of my son in order to avoid a TPK...(I let him it the guard drake on a 14 rather than a 15 and I had it drop at 2 HP in order to prevent it from taking out another PC).

So are we doing something wrong? Did others have similar experiences? If I was designing this adventure these two fights would have had larger numbers of much weaker monsters...the sort that first level PCs can take out in one hit (which is what goblins were in every other version of D&D....)

Is this how 4E is in general? The combats seemed very long and made to sap almost all the party's strength (I realize I'm free to design my own adventures or modify pre-made ones...but I would think the introductory adventure would be balanced in favor of new players having a good chance of success...)

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

There is a learning curve to 4e. Eventually each step will simply take less time.

 

[RangerWickett]

I think the game is generally marketed toward older players, ones who'll be more comfortable with losing or doing poorly. For younger players, I do think it's better to let them win a lot early on, to hook them on the game.

When I play, my DM kills someone every combat or two, and we dig it because it's a casual game and gives us an excuse to try out new 'toys' (feats, powers, etc.). But we've been playing forever. If I were introducing someone to the game, I'd definitely make them feel like they're doing well, which means tossing them easy fights.

 

[Lancelot]

I've been playing and DMing 25+ years, and it took me three attempts to get through the bonus downloadable Solo Adventure. The final encounter with the "Big Bad" is extremely difficult unless you get lucky.

Similarly, I ran myself through the adventure in the DM's book using a well-crafted 4 PC party, just to test the capabilities of new Essentials PCs. Again, I rate myself as a tactical expert in the game (I should be, after this many years). I was taking fairly optimal actions every round, and achieving reasonably good rolls. The party still TPK'ed in the final encounter.

I've found a lot swings on the initial initiative roll. Get locked into a corner by something nasty, and you're in for a world of hurt. Your rogue can't get optimal positioning, the defender can't lock stuff down. Plus, some of the creatures are hitting very hard. Several of the monsters in these "introductory" adventures can hit for 15+ damage in a single attack (bloodying a defender, or nearly killing anything else), and there's at least one that can drop enough damage to knock out a full-strength character in a single round.

On the flipside, you need focus fire and good rolls from the PCs to achieve a similar effect.

I've noticed this in a lot of recent WotC releases. I think complaints about creature lethality have swung the pendulum too far the other way. Recent Dark Sun releases highlight this. The introductory adventure for Dark Sun features a 1st encounter with multiple (level 1) creatures that have a 4d6+4 damage attack, usable three times each in the encounter. If two of those flank a PC and both hit, the PC is likely killed outright (even if neither crits). I had a group of 15+ years experience players TPK against that encounter simply because they lost initiative. Two of them were dropped in the first round, and the others swiftly followed.

So, my suggestion? It's the DM's role to adjust the difficulty to suit. The default these days seems to be "pretty hard, unless you're quite expert with the game". I'd suggest lowering monster damage or fudging some dice rolls if you're trying to teach new, younger players.

 

[Uller]

It wasn't so much the potential of "losing" that was the problem...it was that the combats took sooooooo long. I think the second fight was upwards of 15 rounds and not only exceeded my son's 12 year old attention span...it exceeded my 38 year-old one (not that my attention span is that long...I'm riddled with ADD)...

1e and 2e certainly had the potential of death, especially for 1st level characters....The kobald swing his club and hits an AC 9...your magic user's AC is 10...thats a hit. He does 3 damage...you have 2 HP? Your dead...sorry you didn't get to cast your one Magic Missile spell...go roll a new character...

I guess it just wasn't what I was expected so I'm wondering is this the way 4E is supposed to be (longer combats)? Is it just this adventure? We just made crappy characters and bad tactical decision? Some combination of those?

I'm not trying to bash 4e here....I think Wizards is on the right track. But I was expecting the game to be faster paced, I guess.

 

[Uller]

So, my suggestion? It's the DM's role to adjust the difficulty to suit. The default these days seems to be "pretty hard, unless you're quite expert with the game". I'd suggest lowering monster damage or fudging some dice rolls if you're trying to teach new, younger players.

That seems to be correct...and I guess that is what confused me...I'm expecting the "starter" set to be designed for newbies...Every published adventure for every version has required DMs to make adjustments to fit their players' PCs, playing style, etc...but I just didn't expect that for a introductory adventure with 4 iconic PCs...MU, Cleric, Fighting-man, thief...

So I guess that is what I'll do...I'll go through the adventure and adjust it to be more appropriate.

 

[Thor]

Those results seem strange to me. I ran a 1st level adventure for my group using all Essentials classes on Sunday, and the Thief alone was doing an average of 20.5 damage with each hit. Add in a Slayer and a Hexblade, and our encounters went very quickly. I think the longest encounter went 6 or 7 rounds, and that was primarily due to lots of difficult terrain that made it difficult to position.

A couple possibilities:
1. 4E is scaled for five-character parties rather than four. There are rules in the DM's Kit for scaling encounters based on the number of characters in the party. If you ran the encounters as is, they would still have been winnable but slightly more difficult than intended.

2. Were all your attack and damage bonuses calculated correctly? Was the Thief achieving combat advantage and making use of his Sneak Attack damage and his Backstab damage? He should have been delivering fairly massive damage with each hit, enough to take down or nearly take down a 1st level goblin in a single hit. Was the Slayer making use of his Powerstrike damage?

3. Were the characters focusing fire? Or did they all choose an individual target? If you focus fire, you should be able to take down at least one opponent per round.

 

[sst187]

I am in pretty much exactly the same boat as the guy that started this thread:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/297237-d-d-4th-edition-core-essentials.html

...except that I had also played 3e for several years when it first came out, at least until all my free time dried up between coaching hockey, work, joining the Army, going to Iraq, coming home from Iraq, rescuing my unit's security dog from Iraq, 7 puppy surprise! (deep breath)...coaching more hockey, working more, new baby on the way...D&D sort of fell by the way side...

...anyway...my son is 12. We picked up the red box about a month ago. My son played through the player book and the downloadable Ghost Light Fens adventure. Over the weekend we decided to play through the adventure in the DM book with me DMing. We used the character builder to build three more characters. I ran the wizard and cleric while my son ran the fighter and rogue. The fight with the goblins and wolves proved exceedingly tough for our four first level characters...most of the PCs had to expend their daily powers and most of their healing surges.

Fair enough, I thought...It is on the way to the dungeon...the PCs can rest prior to entering the dungeon. He chose to take the southern passage into the goblin lair...the one that leads to two goblins, a shaman and a guard drake...this fight was tougher than the first...One character died (the cleric!) and one was nearly killed. The fight took forever and my son was noticably bored. We're just learning and we probably weren't making optimal decisions...but I would think the first two encounters in a first level adventure would be the easy "minion" sort that builds tension and story...maybe drops a clue or two about the nature of the enemy/challenge and saps a little of the PCs' strength...not encounters that nearly kills (or actually kills) PCs and forces the party to retreat and rest. Honestly...I even cheated a little in favor of my son in order to avoid a TPK...(I let him it the guard drake on a 14 rather than a 15 and I had it drop at 2 HP in order to prevent it from taking out another PC).

So are we doing something wrong? Did others have similar experiences? If I was designing this adventure these two fights would have had larger numbers of much weaker monsters...the sort that first level PCs can take out in one hit (which is what goblins were in every other version of D&D....)

Is this how 4E is in general? The combats seemed very long and made to sap almost all the party's strength (I realize I'm free to design my own adventures or modify pre-made ones...but I would think the introductory adventure would be balanced in favor of new players having a good chance of success...)

That would be my thread and I have had a very similar experience to yours. The final encounter of the Ghost Tower downloadable was very tough and I did fudge some rolls to help my son. Very tough indeed!

 

[Mengu]

I realize I'm echoing some of what's already been said.

The DM has a pretty big burden in 4e. A fight that's easy to a group of veteran tacticians can be lethal to an inexperienced group who care more about reacting to a situation, holding actions, and trying random things to see what happens.

The published adventures straddle the line between the two. It's assumed to be the DM's job to make adjustments as needed for the group.

What's worse since the DM is likely not the author for a published adventure, he may not be able to portray what's expected of the PC's and players can get wrong impressions about a situation. The PC's may think they are in a fun bar brawl, when the author may have intended for a band of assassins to try and kill the PC's and throw the blame on someone else. If the PC's fail to understand the gravity of the situation and are swinging chairs as improvised weapons using a tertiary stat to make basic attacks, the enemy alpha strike will leave them unable to retaliate before they know what hit them.

The way to keep the game going against inexperienced or casual groups, is to be casual as DM. Have enemies attack bystanders. Have them ready actions to protect a leader type. Have one of them run past some PC's to close and block a door to trap them in, wasting some actions while drawing opportunity attacks. Whatever team PC seems to be "doing wrong", team monster can "do it wrong" also.

Ultimately it takes some experience for DM to figure out what kind of balance is needed. In the group I DM for, initially I had to water the difficulty down a bit. Now I find that things work quite well just out of the box without tweaking the difficulty up or down too much. In one of the groups I play in, the DM pushes the difficulty to what feels to me like through the roof. In various LFR games, we seem to do fine playing with one less PC than intended.

Best advice I can give is to take stock of the situation when things go bad, and take the adventure somewhere else (aka, cheat!). Maybe the city guard shows up just in time. Maybe an overwhelming number of enemy recruits show up, so the PC's either have to surrender, or the enemy feels safe with their numbers to knock the PC's unconscious and capture them alive for an agenda. Or have the enemies hear a rumbling from the woods, and flee. The PC's have the choice of waiting to see what the rumbling is, or flee themselves. Either way, you play it like that was your intention all along, having kept a secret round count, and no one will be the wiser. Even better if you had the forethought to drop in hints about a ghost haunting the woods.

For the moment, my advice would be to run the encounters as though there was one less PC. That should tone down the intensity a bit, let the players learn how their characters work best, if they show interest in the build and action optimization aspect of the game. If not, you can run an easy mode game for an entire campaign and still have fun. There isn't a "wrong" way to play the game, so long as everyone is enjoying it.

 

[OnlineDM]

I guess it just wasn't what I was expected so I'm wondering is this the way 4E is supposed to be (longer combats)? Is it just this adventure? We just made crappy characters and bad tactical decision? Some combination of those?

I haven't played these particular adventures yet, but I would say that a typical exciting combat in 4e takes 5-6 rounds. An easy one should be over in 2-3 rounds. 15+ rounds? Well, I don't think I've personally ever been in a 4e combat that long. A truly epic combat would last about 10 rounds, in my experience.

My guess is that Thor is on to something; if you ran the adventure as written and it was intended for a party of 5 PCs but you had only 4, that could result in a long, difficult combat. Even then I'm shocked that it could take 15 rounds. There would have to be a lot of misses on both sides in order for combat to go that long.

That leads me to wonder if maybe the to-hit bonuses for your PCs were miscalculated or just too low. A well-built first-level PC should be attacking at somewhere between +4 (for a spellcaster with an 18 in their primary stat) to +9 (for a weapon user with a 20 in their primary stat, a +3 proficiency weapon, and a weapon expertise feat). Your rogue, for instance, should be at +8 or +9 to hit (+10 or +11 with combat advantage), which would mean that they could hit AC15 on a roll of 6 or better (4 or better with combat advantage). Misses should be the exception rather than the rule in a fair fight. Misses (on either side) definitely make combat drag on.